If you dread maths homework as much as your child does, you are not alone, and you are not failing them. Research from Loughborough University and National Numeracy flagged in 2025 suggests that nearly a quarter of UK parents feel highly anxious when helping their child with maths. What struck me most when I read into this, though, is not the headline number. It is what comes next: that parental maths anxiety can be unintentionally passed on to children, and that it can hold back their numeracy development even when the child themselves has perfectly normal or above-average ability. The problem is not always coming from the classroom. Sometimes it is travelling from the kitchen table.
I think this matters right now. There is a real conversation starting among parents, teachers and researchers in the UK about where early maths confidence comes from, and it is not just about curriculum. It is about how children feel during the moments they practise. This piece is my attempt to be genuinely useful to parents who recognise themselves in that statistic.
Why Maths Anxiety Transfers, Even When You Try to Hide It
Here is the honest truth: children are brilliant at reading us. They notice the small sigh when you open the homework folder. They clock the slight tension in your voice when you explain long multiplication for the third time. They sense when you are not confident, even if you never say the words "I was rubbish at maths."
Researchers have found this is not about explicit messaging. You do not have to tell a child that maths is scary for them to absorb a sense that it is. The anxiety transfers through hesitation, through the emotional temperature of the room, through the way the session ends. A child who finishes a maths session with a parent who was stressed will associate maths with stress. Over time, that adds up.
The single most important thing I have taken from this research is that the problem is not your knowledge gap. It is the emotional atmosphere around maths practice. And that is actually something you can change, without becoming a mathematician overnight.
What I Keep Hearing From Families
We are an early-stage company, and our conversations are still relatively small in number, so I want to be careful not to overstate things. But in the early conversations we have had with parents exploring XTables Champions, one theme keeps surfacing: the homework table is a battleground. Children cry. Parents feel helpless. The session either descends into tears or gets abandoned entirely. And then everybody feels worse.
What those same parents tell us when they start approaching times tables as a game rather than a test is different. The shift is not dramatic or instant, but the emotional charge around the topic softens. When a parent stops being the examiner and starts being a fellow player, the dynamic in the room genuinely changes.
As our founder Gal Darrash puts it, "We built this so that a mum or dad who hated maths at school can sit down with their child and just play, without feeling like they have to get everything right."
That is the idea at the heart of what XTables Champions does. The games, things like Snap, Battleships and Connect Four built around times tables, are not just there to make learning more fun for children. They are there to reposition the adult too. You are not teaching. You are playing. And that changes everything about how the session feels.
Practical Ways to Lower the Temperature at Home
Whether or not you use any particular platform, here are the things I genuinely think help, based on what the research points to and what we hear from families.
First, try to take yourself out of the teacher role entirely. If you are the one drilling questions and checking answers, you are in an evaluative position, and children feel that. Even asking questions in a softer tone can help, but swapping to a game structure removes the dynamic altogether.
Second, normalise not knowing. If your child sees you play a game and get a multiplication wrong without the world ending, that is genuinely powerful modelling. "Oh, six times seven, I always mix that one up" said lightly and moved on is more useful than any amount of reassurance that maths is not scary.
Third, watch the session length. Research on maths anxiety consistently points to fatigue and frustration as amplifiers. Fifteen focused, playful minutes is worth more than forty difficult ones. Short, regular, low-stakes sessions build the familiarity that eventually becomes confidence.
Fourth, celebrate fluency over speed. One thing that traditional times tables practice gets wrong is that it prizes rapid recall above everything. But recall without understanding is fragile. If your child can work something out and understand why it is true, that is a stronger foundation than firing off answers under pressure.
The Times Tables Problem Is Not Just a School Problem
This is something I feel quite strongly about, and it sits behind why I find this particular piece of research so important right now. There is a tendency to assume that if a child is struggling with times tables, the solution lives entirely at school. More teacher time, better resources, different methods. And yes, those things matter.
But a child spends far more waking hours at home than in a classroom. What happens in the evenings and at weekends with maths has an enormous cumulative effect. If we can change how maths feels at home, not perfectly, not overnight, but directionally, that is a meaningful contribution to a child's relationship with numbers.
The opportunity the research from Loughborough and National Numeracy points to is real. Parents are not the problem. But parents can be part of the solution, and they need tools that actually fit their lives and their own emotional relationship with the subject.
Ready to Make Times Tables Feel Different at Home?
If anything in this article resonates, whether it is the homework tears, the guilt of feeling anxious yourself, or simply wanting something that feels less like a test and more like family time, I would love to invite you to explore what XTables Champions has built.
Our multiplayer games let your child practise times tables in the same way they play games they already love, and they let you sit alongside them as a player rather than a marker. There are also tools for parents to see how their child is getting on without any pressure attached.
Head over to xtableschampions.com to find out more, or get in touch directly if you want to talk through whether it could work for your family. We are a small, founder-led team and we genuinely have time for those conversations.